


Ozma: Part I

by Ionaperidot



Series: The Oz Project [1]
Category: Oz - L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Genderqueer Character, POV ozma, POV tip, sketchy glinda, tip is an okay dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-06 15:55:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18391598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ionaperidot/pseuds/Ionaperidot
Summary: When Tip runs away with his Jack-o-Lantern, he doesn't plan on running right into a civil war. Now he has to help the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman save Oz from an army they can't fight, but all he wants to do is go home.





	Ozma: Part I

Mombi wasn’t that bad. She threatened to turn me to stone a few times, yeah, but I was no angel. Better moms around, but at least she never pretended to be anything but the wicked witch she was.

They want me to write the whole story down. For the Royal Records, they said. I guess they don’t care about my childhood with Mombi and stuff, the good parts like climbing trees and playing in the mud. Probably wanna hear about how I was never comfortable like that, but I was. Sometimes—maybe most times—I wish I could go back. But I can’t, and they don’t care what dumb little boys want. Down to business, then.

I’d been fighting with Mombi. We got along pretty well sometimes, actually, but right then I was mad at her. So I decided to make this scarecrow, jack-o-lantern thing, surprise her and see if she’d scream.

She didn’t. Maybe I made the face too friendly. It was big and open and smiling, bright orange, perfectly ripe. Gigantic pumpkin head on that scrawny stick body. He used to call me father.

Anyway. Mombi’d got some new magic powder while she was out. Sprinkled it all over Jack, and BAM, the stupid thing comes to life.

And let me tell you, stupid is right. Great guy, but man is he ever dumb.

Probably my fault. Picked a pumpkin with bad seeds or something. Glinda’d say I just wasn’t mean to be a dad, and maybe—probably—she’s right, but screw Glinda, anyway.

Maybe I shouldn’t put this in the Royal Records. Powerful lady to offend, even if they do all say she’s nice. She stuck me here. I’m not feeling too trusting.

Once Jack starts moving Mombi calls for me, and I slink out of the shadows, only a little surprised. These are the kinds of things that happen when you’re raised by a wicked witch.

“You were supposed to scream.”

“Scream? But you’ve given me such a wonderful gift, Tip. With this thing to do all the chores, I won’t need to bother with you anymore. He won’t even need to eat.”

“I don’t understand,” Jack says. We ignore him.

“What will you do with me?” We’ve played this game before, but she has a different answer every time.

“Hm. I think I’ll make you a statue for my garden.”

“You don’t know how to do that.”

“I didn’t. But that Crooked Wizard has sold me some very interesting new magic.”

“What is a statue?” asks Jack.

We ignore him again, and he trails behind us into the house, where Mombi starts mixing up her statue potion. And dinner. I help stir the pots, and we keep on arguing about the statue problem.

“At least wait until I’m older. What kind of lawn ornament is a scrawny little boy?”

“Gritty realism. Avant-garde.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“And now you never will. Oh, the money I’ll save on food and clothes, Tip.”

“Maybe if you didn’t eat so much…”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Mombi. Do I at least get a last meal?”

“I don’t see much point in it. Statues don’t get hungry.”

“But I’m stirring the soup for you.”

She sighs. “All right then. You may have some soup.”

“When are you gonna petrify me?”

“In the morning, I think. We’ll give the potion some time to settle.”

“Can I have breakfast too, then?”

“If you do your morning chores first.” 

“Chores? On the day I get stoned? Can’t Jack do it?”

“Do you want your breakfast or not?”

“Yes, Mombi.”

Over dinner she tells me, like always, what she brought back from the Crooked Wizard. Today there’s the Powder of Life she used on Jack, the petrifying potion for me, and something she calls Wishing Pills. I ask if I can try one.

“Maybe in the morning,” she says.

“Before or after you make me a statue?”

“Hm. I suppose we’d best make it after, or you’ll just wish not to be a statue, won’t you?”

“I’ll wish for you to be one instead.”

She laughs. “Go on to bed, Tip. I’ll clean up and take care of the pumpkin man.”

-

It’s not the first time I’ve run from Mombi. Far from it. It was almost a game between us, by that time. And I took the Powder of Life, yeah, but I thought she’d come catch me and bring it back. I don’t quite know what happened—just got really lost, I guess. She couldn’t find me, and I couldn’t find home by the time I got to missing it. I never meant to really run away. But it was an adventure, so I kept on going.

Anyway, I can’t sleep, and I decide long after she’s blown out the last candle that this is the perfect time to run away. I can take Jack—I’ve never run away with anybody else before. So I pack up some food, snag the box of new magic, and go to grab him.

Really not my best work. His joints are weak, he moves too slow, and as soon as I let it slip that pumpkins rot after awhile, he’s all afraid of dying and stuff. But I can fix the joints when I get around to it, and when I tell him I made him he starts calling me father.

I never thought about having kids before, but I hope Jack’s the only one I ever get.

“Where are we going, Father?” he asks me when it starts to get light again. We’ve wandered onto an official road by now, and I have no idea where we are anymore. The middle of the night is not a good time to run away if you’re planning on walking back home in a couple hours. But it’s a yellow road, which means the Winkies put it in, which means it probably leads right to the Emerald City. 

I’m from Gillikin country, and our color is purple here. You’d think, since the city does green, the roads to it would be green too. But in Winkie country it’s all about yellow, and most of the road makers are from there. So they made all the big central stuff their color, and then for roads within each region it’s every man for himself. We don’t have a lot of roads where I’m from, with the farms and everything. Some of the Gillikins are a little more sophisticated, I think, but the local Good Witch who rules us is pretty laid back, and old, and she’s not pushing us to keep up with the times like in some places. We’re kind of secluded up here in northern Oz, and no one pays much attention to what we do. So the yellow brick road is the only paved road I’ve ever seen, and I tell Jack it’s taking us south, into the Emerald City.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s the capital of Oz. Where the Scarecrow rules.”

“Who is the Scarecrow?” he asks.

“He’s—well, he’s a scarecrow. To scare away the crows in the corn fields. But he helped Dorothy on her quest, and he was left in charge of all Oz when she and the Wizard went home.”

“And who is Dorothy?”

“Don’t you know anything, Jack?”

“I was only born this afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon, Jack.” He doesn’t answer, just looks at me with the huge permanent smile. “Fine.” I start to sing.

“The Witch Who Fell from the Sky” is probably the most famous ballad in Oz. Definitely the most recent to get really popular. But I know most of them. Music is big for Gillikins. Anyway, this is my favorite. I told Mombi once that I wanted to marry Dorothy when I grew up, but she just laughed at me.

So I sing the whole thing for Jack—how Dorothy, the witch from the land of Kansas, rode the wind into Oz, not alone, but with an entire house and her dog. How she crushed the witch of the east beneath the house to free the Munchkins, and our very own witch of the north sent her off to the city to find a way home from the Wizard. The friends she gathered along the way, the witch of the west that she defeated for the Wizard, freeing the Winkies and the Flying Monkeys. I sing about his untimely departure for a land called Oklahoma, and how she and her friends travelled south to Glinda, who finally sent her home by teaching her the magic of the Silver Slippers she’d taken from the Eastern witch.

Mombi doesn’t mind me singing about killing the wicked witches and stuff. She’s one, too, but it’s different. She doesn’t go around oppressing Winkies and Munchkins and monkeys and stuff. She does bad magic, I guess, but she doesn’t really use the bad magic to do bad things. So it’s okay, and she hates those witches too. But she’ll get a little weird about Glinda and the Wizard sometimes. And I guess the Wizard was pretty stupid, leaving in the magic balloon before Dorothy was ready, and pretty incompetent and irresponsible, sending a little girl to do his dirty work. Anyway, they’re only background characters, in this ballad at least. Dorothy is the greatest folk hero of all time, so far, and I like to sing about her. But Jack’s got his priorities all backwards, and all he wants to talk about is the stupid Scarecrow.

Not stupid. The Scarecrow’s supposed to be the smartest person in Oz. Jack is stupid, though, and he won’t shut up about the Scarecrow.

“But how did he come to be alive? Is it the same way that I’m alive? Are you his father, too?”

“I’m not his father, Jack.” I’m starting to regret bringing the Pumpkin-head.

“Does straw go bad like pumpkins do?”

“I don’t know, Jack. Probably, if it gets wet.”

“And has he been ruling for a very long time?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“I don’t want to die yet. I’ve only just started to be alive.”

I sigh. We’ve stopped walking now, and I’m kicking around in the dirt, thinking how strange it is that Mombi hasn’t come to drag me back home yet, wishing she’d hurry up and do it by lunchtime. “We’ll go meet him, okay? We’ll go to the Emerald City and meet the Scarecrow and ask him how he keeps his straw from rotting. Now will you shut up?”

I didn’t sleep much last night, and I’m in a terrible mood. I don’t know why Mombi hasn’t found me yet.

His joints aren’t going to hold up much longer. I can’t just sit down and wait here for Mombi to find us. That’s giving up. Not playing the game. But if I have to take a long break to fix Jack up, and she just happens to catch up with us then, well, I haven’t exactly surrendered that way, and she won’t tease me for it later.

We’re in the middle of nowhere, but someone’s left a sawhorse sitting out. A real one—I mean one that actually looks like a horse, or tries to. I have Jack sit on in, but as soon as he bends his legs they fall all to pieces, and for one terrifying second I think his head’s been cracked for sure. He’s annoying, but he’s alive, and I’m sort of his dad. I don’t want him to die.

No wonder Mombi’s always in such a bad mood. Parenting is hard.

It’s Jack’s idea to bring the Sawhorse to life so that he can ride on it and not get broken. Or not any more broken. I’ve fixed him up as well as I can with the bits of twine I found in my pockets. And I know Mombi will be mad at me, really actually mad, if I waste a bunch more of the Powder of Life, but maybe she can sense what I’m doing or something, and then come find me. She has to find me and take me home before she can punish me.

I was paying attention when she did the spell—I always pay attention, even if I want Mombi to think I don’t care about all that dumb magic stuff. So it’s pretty easy. I just sprinkle on some powder everywhere, then say the magic words, which are easy, and do the hand motions, which are a little harder because it was kind of dark out when Mombi used it on Jack. But I must get it close enough, because the big hunk of wood yawns and stretches out like it comes to life every day. Jack starts talking about how great a sorcerer I am, but I’m not really paying attention, because I just did magic. Big magic—I created life.

Angry about the waste of powder or not, Mombi had better be really damn impressed.

She might be so proud she doesn’t even care about the powder.

Might have been so proud, I mean. It’s all different now.

-

The Sawhorse is even dumber than Jack. Or maybe it’s my fault. I get Jack all tied down on his back, and I get on behind him, and I teach the Sawhorse to go and go faster. We didn’t get around to how to stop.

Next thing I know, I’m flat on my back on the ground, and Jack and the Sawhorse are specks on the horizon.

I hope that dumb hunk of wood knows where he’s going, or I’ll never be able to find them again.

-

I think I’ve been walking for approximately forever when I finally start running into some other people. Funny looking people, too. Course, all the ballads say that’s pretty normal for Oz. You just don’t see much of it back in the parts where I live, ‘cept for stuff like Jack and the Sawhorse. That’s witchcraft strange. These people are naturally strange, I think.

Their clothes are the strangest. All girls, all wearing the same dress, real fancy, with a whole bunch of colors on it. All the Oz colors, actually. Red, blue, purple, yellow. Quadling, Munchkin, Gillikin, Winkie. And a bunch of green, too, I guess for the Emerald City. And knitting needles in their hair, to stab their enemies, it turns out, when they notice me and tell me all about how they’re going to conquer the Emerald City. The girls are taking over. Say no one will fight back because they’re girls, and then they can have all the jewels in the city and use the treasury to buy new dresses, and they’re gonna rule Oz however they want. 

Mostly, however they want sounds pretty irresponsible, and I’m not really sure where people like me and everyone else are supposed to fit into this plan. Do all the girls in Oz get new dresses, or just the ones in the army? How do they pay for stuff like new roads that the treasury usually does? What happens to all the boys?

Actually, maybe I don’t want to know. They’re all sort of looking at me. Like I’m real cute, but not real cute like a little boy. Real cute like a puppy or something.

The fanciest one—her name is Jinjur—comes closer and sort of coos at me. “Aren’t you just the cutest thing? Stick with me, kid, and you can be my own personal slave when we win the revolution.”

Um. An offer I can’t refuse? 

I gotta find Jack. Fast. And get us away from all these crazy ladies. Mombi’s not going to be able to find me in the middle of a war zone. Maybe we should head back toward Gillikin country, at least. We’ll be easier to find if we’re closer to home.

They let me stick around, anyway, which could be worse. At least they seem to know which roads to take into the city. But they want me to carry all their stuff. Mostly lunch baskets. All empty.

Why did I think this stupid adventure would be so fun? I’m tired. And my feet hurt. And I’m getting sunburned—I never get sunburned—and I haven’t had anything to drink in ages. And I miss Mombi. And food. I really miss food. Where’s a lunch pail tree when you need one?

At the city gates they start right away jabbing the poor guard with their knitting needles, and I slip right past all of it. The palace should be easy to find. I’m just gonna warn the Scarecrow that he’s under attack, find Jack and the Sawhorse, and get out of here fast.

-

I find Jack inside the palace, chatting with the Scarecrow, both casual as you please, looking for all the world as if the strangest war in history isn’t being waged just right outside. They’re arguing—in the same language—about whether they can speak the same language, and it looks like they’ve been playing horseshoes, right here in the middle of this fancy room.

“Hello, Father,” Jack says. The Scarecrow doesn’t even notice me.

There’s a pretty girl sitting on a couch across the room, looking all amused and exasperated, and she motions for me to come over. I sit down on the very edge of the couch, and she tilts her head toward Jack.

“I take it this one belongs to you?”

She smiles, and I nod and duck my head. She’s very pretty.

“My name is Jellia Jamb.”

“Tip.” I’m blushing. I wish I wasn’t blushing.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Tip.”

We watch them play another round of horseshoes before I figure I’d better buck up and tell the Scarecrow what’s going on.

He doesn’t seem too concerned, until I mention how the one in charge wants to make a rug out of his outsides and use his insides to stuff a couch. He says we’ll go to his friend the Tin Man’s place in Winkie country. Then he says he needs some time to plan our escape. We all sit there for fifteen minutes while he thinks. Then I stand up.

“All right. We need to go.”

“Young man,” says the Scarecrow, “have patience. We will leave as soon as I have discovered a feasible plan.”

“Here’s a plan. We all get on the back of my Sawhorse, and we get out of here now.”

“Young man,” he says again, “I am the king here, and I will plan our escape.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, Mr. King Scarecrow, sir, but a revolution is happening, you have no army, and you’re sitting here arguing with a Jack O’ Lantern about whether or not you’re speaking the same language. Plus, the revolution’s all girls, and you can’t hit a girl. Someone’s gotta take charge here.”

Later, the Scarecrow will be kindly pretentious, telling all of Oz how he began, even then, to suspect the truth. He didn’t, of course. He just got all huffy, then let me take over.

Once we find the Sawhorse wandering around in the next room, the major flaw in my plan shows up. No way we’re getting two people, a Scarecrow, and a Pumpkinhead all on his back.

“You needn’t bother about me,” Jellia says. “I am, after all, a girl. They won’t do anything to harm me, and if they try, I can hit back.”

I really like Jellia.

So we all get up on the Sawhorse, and he runs and runs and runs, through the palace and the army and the city and a couple of fields, and then right into a big lake.

-

By the time we get out of the water, everything is just a mess. I make the horse stand in the sun to dry off while I deal with everything else. The Scarecrow is completely soaked, all soggy and lumpy and disgusting, so I have to take out all his straw and spread it out on the ground, so he can dry faster. But the real problem is Jack. His body is still sitting there on top of the Sawhorse, in perfect shape except the clothes are a little wet, but there’s no sign of his head.

What if it cracked? What if it got pulled a mile away by the stupid current? He may be annoying, but he’s mine, and right now he’s all I have from home. He can’t be gone. He can’t.

After a while we spot the head bobbing along on the waves, but it’s too far to tell if it’s all still intact. If Jack is still alive.

It’s the Scarecrow’s idea to fish it out with a big stick, but he’s still all wet, so I have to find the big stick and do the fishing all by myself.

Jack’s fine, it turns out, and then I just feel stupid for being so worried about a dumb pumpkin.

-

It’s a good thing that army is too busy with their jewels and the treasury and everything to bother following us, because we have to sit around for ages waiting for everybody to dry out again. And then I make the Sawhorse go much, much slower when we leave this time. Getting dumped off his back twice was more than enough, and the second time I had to swim with one hand so I could get the soggy Scarecrow to shore, too.

It’s a really long ride, and Winkie country is the opposite of where I want to be headed. But I don’t think I could dump the stupid Scarecrow here and head for home without upsetting Jack. And maybe getting charged with treason, if he gets his throne back from the girls. 

Jack and the Sawhorse pick a fight, but after that the Scarecrow tells us all stories about when he was with Dorothy, so that’s pretty fun, but then it gets too dark to see where we’re going, so we stop for the night, even though I’m the only one here who can sleep.

It’s been a really long day.

-

I guess the Scarecrow isn’t that bad. He’s picked a bunch of berries for me to eat by the time I wake up in the morning, which he didn’t have to do. I’m surprised he thought about it. No one else around here can eat, either.

It doesn’t take us too much longer to get to the Winkie capitol after that, and the Sawhorse manages not to screw anything up this time. The Scarecrow gets us into the palace easy, and then there’s just a lot of yelling and hugging and the rest of us try to stay out of the way.

Then the Tin Man notices Jack, and we have to go through that whole thing again, where all the fake people bond over being fake people who don’t have to eat or sleep or anything. And then Jack goes off about how his head is going to spoil. Again.

The Tin Man offers to have him canned. I almost offer to have him be the can, but he is an emperor or something, so I suppose I should have respect.

When he finally notices me he introduces himself as Nick, which is all nice and not pretentious, so maybe he could be all right. I pull Jack and the Sawhorse away a little so Nick and the Scarecrow can talk about their politics. They get as far as planning to round up an army.

“Nonsense,” says Nick. “The five of us are plenty,” says Nick. “I have a bright, shining axe,” says Nick.

The five of us. I am a child. Jack is a top-heavy stick figure. The Sawhorse and the Scarecrow are, well, a sawhorse and a scarecrow, and Nick—

It’s obvious he’s not the one who went in for brains.

But it sure isn’t obvious the Scarecrow did either, because he agrees, and some Winkies come and fix up Jack’s legs and stuff—that’s my job—and the next thing I know we’re on the road again, heading right back into trouble. And this time we all have to walk. Except Jack. He still rides.

I just want to go home.

-

We’re lost within a half hour. So much for Nick’s shortcuts. Everything everywhere is sunflowers, in every direction. Then girls’ faces start appearing in the center of the flowers, and I understand. This is a game I used to play with Mombi, when I was really little, where she gave the flowers faces so I could pretend to have friends. Mombi is looking for me. No—she knows where I am. She’s trying to get me back. She probably tracked me as far as Emerald City, and she’s letting me know. She’s maybe getting away with the big public magic—it takes a lot of power to make this many flower girls, from this far away—by offering to help Jinjur’s army. 

But she’s in Emerald City. And this feels like a trap, but I know it’s from her, so I know there’s a way I can get through it.

Nick won’t chop down the sunflowers. If his heart won’t let him hurt some plants, I don’t see what use he’s going to be against the army. “All we need is the five of us, no army.” Really.

I wave my hand through one. Yep. “They’re illusions.”

“Then we will close our eyes and walk through,” says Nick.

“My eyes are painted on. They don’t close.”

And he’s supposed to be the smart one. Can’t he just walk through because he knows they’re not actually there?

We get through, anyway, and everything is fine until the Sawhorse runs right through a rabbit hole and breaks off his leg. Nick barely catches Jack’s head when he trips.

My son could have been pie. Wow. This parenting thing is not for the faint of heart.

I wonder if Mombi will be a good grandma.

Probably not, but it’ll be funny to watch.

We’re still trying to figure out what to do about the Sawhorse’s broken leg when a giant bug walks up. And I mean giant. Not a spider the size of your fist, like we get in the barn sometimes. This thing is bigger than me. It’s almost a tall as Nick.

It also talks, and has a business card. I’ve never even seen a business card, only heard about them in stories. And now I’m getting one from a cockroach in a suit and tie. Life has gotten extremely weird in the last week.

All I want is to get back to Mombi, go home and take a nap or something. But we have to take a break, again, and listen to the stupid Wogglebug tell his stupid story about how he lived in some classroom in some school until the teacher put him under a microscope, and then he took off while he was still all magnified.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how microscopes work, but what do I know? I don’t have magic brains like the Scarecrow, and I’m not “thoroughly educated” like the stupid Wogglebug. The stupid Wogglebug who’s going on about how strange we all are, like he’s never seen a mirror. And I want to go home, and the Sawhorse still has a broken leg.

“We’ll give him one of the Pumpkinhead’s legs,” says the stupid Wogglebug, like he’s the one in charge here, like he has any right to go around casually suggesting that we mutilate my son.

No wonder Mombi’s so crabby all the time, if raising me is as hard as raising Jack. And I bet she didn’t sign up for me any more than I signed up for him—she never wants to talk about my real parents, but I know they died when the Wizard came to Oz, and there was no other family, so she got stuck with me.

Technically she bought me, which sounds really messed up. For a long time I thought that was just how orphans work, but then the girl who lives by the river told me I was stupid, and people don’t buy orphans—orphans are so worthless, people can barely give them away for free. Sometimes they have to pay people to take them.

I hit her really hard, because I didn’t know yet that you weren’t supposed to hit girls. Then she told her dad, and he hit me, so I told Mombi, and she cursed him with neverending boils. The whole family moved away after that, but we got a letter with a bill in it later, to pay for having the curse lifted. It must have been from someone important, because Mombi paid even though the harvest was bad, and all we had to eat for ages and ages was potatoes.

She was more motherly than usual for a while after that, bandaging my bruises and swearing by Lurline that no one would hurt me again. (Lurline is the fairy who created Oz. Her daughter was the first queen, and her line ruled unbroken until the Wizard came to Oz. She’s half history, half religion, and the only thing we swear by.)

Anyway, she bought me from a travelling salesman when I was a baby, because he was travelling to giant country next, and she didn’t think that was a good place for a baby to be. She wasn’t planning on having a baby, but I’m useful around the farm now that I’m not a baby anymore, so it’s okay.

Or it was. Before all this happened.

Everyone thinks it’s just a fantastic idea to chop off Jack’s leg and stick it on the Sawhorse—everyone except me and Jack and a little bit the Sawhorse, so everyone whose opinion matters around here, anyway. And the stupid Wogglebug keeps on making stupid jokes about breaking horses. Jack and the Sawhorse are mine, and everybody else can just sit down and shut up about them.

The stupid Wogglebug laughs when I tell him that, and then gets all huffy when I say he isn’t even funny. And then all condescending and superior.

“Puns are the highest form of humor,” he says.

“Anyone can make a stupid pun,” I say.

“You are not educated enough to judge,” the stupid Wogglebug says. “I am thoroughly educated, and I say that puns display genius,” the stupid Wogglebug says. “If I rode the Sawhorse, he would be a horse and buggy,” the stupid Wogglebug says.

No one laughs. A little because it isn’t even funny, and a little, I think, because I’m getting really upset, and I’m the little kid in this party—everyone knows you’re supposed to be nice to the little kid.

The Scarecrow asks him to “restrain his superior education” while he’s with us. Nick waves his axe a little.

I complain a lot, but Nick and the Scarecrow are really great, actually. It’s not long after that when we stop again so I can rest, even though I’m the only one who needs to rest and I didn’t ask or anything.

Then they notice we’re resting near the village of the Field Mice. The Queen of the Field Mice owes Nick and the Scarecrow a favor; there’s a whole verse about it in “The Witch Who Fell from the Sky.”

I have the whole thing memorized. I have most of the ballads memorized—I’m good at that.

We meet with the Queen, and a bunch of mice hide in the Scarecrow’s chest. They think the girls in the Emerald City will be scared. I think only stupid girls in stupid folk songs are scared of cute little mice—I know all the folk songs, too.

Mombi sets up a few more illusions for us on the way. Everyone is wimpy and kind of scared about it, but I know she’s just teasing me. Probably making it look like she’s slowing us down, for Jinjur and her friends, but mostly she’s giving me a hard time. We get a river, a stone wall, and a bunch of fake paths. But the best is the fire. The Scarecrow freaks out. Everyone freaks out, actually, except for Nick and the mice. But we go right through it, just like we went through everything else. 

There’s more girls with knitting needles at the gates when we finally get to Emerald City. That’s the first time I’m really worried. I don’t want to be stabbed.

It’s really funny when Nick waves his axe around and they all run screaming. But then we get right to the throne room without any trouble at all, and I think that’s suspicious. The Scarecrow agrees with me, so I guess I can be smart sometimes, too.

Jinjur is on the throne eating caramels, and she says that since she took the throne she’s the queen now, and that means we’re all committing treason. She committed treason first, but maybe that doesn’t matter now that she’s sitting on the throne with a fancy crown? None of the others really seem sure, and if the Scarecrow is the king and Nick is an emperor, I figure they oughta know.

Mombi is somewhere around here. Maybe she can explain it. But no one wants to let Jinjur keep being the queen. We saw on our way in—all the jewels and everything have been pulled out of the sidewalks and storefronts and distributed among the army.

The stupid Wogglebug says the Scarecrow and Jinjur should get married so they can both rule. No one likes that idea. Jack says we should send Jinjur back to her mother, which seems reasonable, but I think we can do one better and lock her in a closet until she promises to behave. That’s what Mombi does when I’m extra naughty.

But while we’re all talking about this, the army sneaks up and grabs Nick’s axe, so that’s a bust.

“The boy belongs to Mombi,” Jinjur says, “so he’ll have to be returned.”

Belongs to. I don’t like that. Technically it’s true; she still has the receipt from the travelling salesman and everything. But I don’t like the way she says it. I just don’t like Jinjur. At all.

“The rest of you aren’t human,” she says, “so it won’t be wicked to destroy you. I’ll have the Pumpkinhead’s head made into tarts, and his body and the Sawhorse will be used for kindling. The Scarecrow, too. I’ll chop up the tin man and feed him to the goats, and I’ll have the bug made into green-turtle soup. Or maybe a Hungarian goulash.”

It’s all looking pretty dire before the mice burst out of the Scarecrow’s chest.

Just a couple of cute little field mice, and they all go off running and screaming. Girls. You can’t run a kingdom if you’re gonna run screaming from some mice. But then I’m not really sure how you’re supposed to rule a kingdom when you run screaming from some girls, either. Maybe the Scarecrow ain’t cut out for this government thing. Better in a classroom, I bet. Or teamwork. All three of them, brain, heart, courage, that could add up to one decent ruler. Or just leave Dorothy in charge, if she didn’t have to go home. She had all that stuff, even if she was just a kid. I’m just a kid, and I’ve got this whole thing down better than the Scarecrow already.

All the girls run out of the throne room, and we barricade the doors quick. I want to run out too and find Mombi, but probably it’s better to wait for her here and not brave the knitting needles again. Jinjur looked really upset, and I don’t think she thinks about me like a person, anymore than she does all the rest of us in here.

Jack is scared; he doesn’t want to be tarts. Nick says not to worry because he’ll spoil if we’re trapped up here for too long, anyway. Some heart he’s got. I pat Jack on the head, but only for a second—he is starting to feel a little squishy and overripe, and I don’t want to think about that.

The stupid Wogglebug is scared, too, about being a goulash, but I don’t feel quite so bad for him. Neither does anyone else, I think; he’s kind of mean.

“Well, I’m going to starve to death if we’re trapped in here forever,” I say, “and so is the Wogglebug.”

“I think I could live for some time on the Pumpkinhead,” says the stupid Wogglebug. And that’s what I get for trying to commiserate. 

The little tin with the Powder of Life in it is kinda digging into my hip a little—this chair is really uncomfortable—so I pull it out of my pocket. That’s what does it, in the end. The Scarecrow decides we should build a big contraption to escape in, and bring it to life instead of having to worry about building engines and stuff, since the Sawhorse can only pull so much weight.

Nick chops up some furniture to fix Jack’s leg quick, then we all start working on the contraption.

The stupid Wogglebug grabs a Gump head off the wall—that’s sort of like an elk, stuffed and mounted—which I guess isn’t totally stupid. We can’t really bring something to life without it having a face somewhere. Jack finds a broom, and the Scarecrow brings a bunch of clothesline. Nick’s got a bunch of big leaves, and the Sawhorse and I find a couple big couches.

Apparently, the penalty for cutting those leaves is to be killed seven times and then locked up for life. I think that’s a little excessive, but Nick doesn’t seem too worried about it. The leaves are important, anyway. We use them to make the wings. The sofas are the body, the broom is the tail, and the clothesline ties all the pieces together. It ends up really big, and I don’t have quite enough Powder left for all of it. We have to leave the sofa legs as they are, so it only flies, no walking.

It starts flying away as soon as I say the magic words; we can only barely get it to land again before it takes off without us. Then I sort of wish it had.

“What’s happening?”

“I was running, in the forest.”

“They shot me. I was dead!”

“What’s happening? Where am I? This isn’t my body! This isn’t me!”

“What am I?”

“What have you done? Undo it! Undo it! Put me back.”

I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I thought—well, why would anyone want to be dead? And it’s not like turning a bunch of sticks and construction equipment into a person. The Gump was alive, and someone killed him, but I fixed it. I undid it. Why would anyone rather be dead than alive?

Maybe it’s because he’s got a whole different body now. I can see that. I get it. Super confusing, and everything is just wrong, and I—anyway. I’ll get that later, not now, not now when he’s just sitting there being all whiney about how he doesn’t get to be dead anymore. I try to cheer him up, but it isn’t really taking. And Scarecrow is being all insensitive about it, making it real obvious he’s not the one who got a heart, and Jack is just being a nuisance, and I don’t know what to do because we don’t have time for anything but running, but I don’t want the Gump to be so sad, and I can’t un-bring someone to life, and I’m not about to resort to murder after one day without adult supervision, and besides, I know we really need him if we want to get out of here.

We all get into the Gump’s couches, and the stupid Wogglebug makes another stupid joke, this time about Jack’s head falling over the edge and the pumpkin becoming squash. I tell him again that his puns aren’t smart and funny, but he still doesn’t care what I have to say.

“Tip,” says the Scarecrow when we’re in the air, “this box has a false bottom.”

He’s looking at the box the Powder of Life came it; he hands it to Nick, and Nick gives it to me, and they’re right. There are three silver pills in the second bottom, and a little instruction card. Wishing pills. But to use them you have to count to seventeen by twos, and even the Scarecrow and the Wogglebug both say that’s impossible. So I guess the pills are useless. That’s okay—I wouldn’t want to use more of Mombi’s stuff without permission, not after we used up all of the Powder of Life, and mostly on stupid things. And now I’m going in the opposite direction from her, again. This is a good adventure, but it never seems to end.

“Where are we even going?” I ask. It’s starting to get dark out.

“We’re going to ask Glinda the Good for help,” the Scarecrow tells me.

That’s cool. Glinda is in “The Witch Who Fell from the Sky,” too. And a couple of other ballads. I bet she’ll be fun to meet.

-

We go all night, because we can’t see well enough to land. But when I wake up in the morning, everyone is panicking. We’ve flown clear on past Glinda. We’ve flown clear past Oz, over the Deadly Desert and into the land that lies beyond.

I wonder if someone will make a ballad about us someday. But maybe a flying sofa with a Gump head isn’t dignified enough for a ballad.

The Gump can’t turn around in the air, so we have to keep on going, farther and farther from Oz, until he can find a good place to land.

I’ve never been outside of Oz before. I don’t think even Mombi has ever been outside of Oz before. 

Even when he does land, the Gump manages to break off two of his four wings. Both on the same side of his body, too. And we land right in a Jackdaw nest. Jackdaws aren’t so bad, normally, but these ones must be even huger than usual to have a nest this big, and I don’t want to still be in it when they get home. And the Gump is completely trashed.

I can’t believe I made him come back to life for this. Maybe I’m about to be a murderer after all.

We start digging around in the Jackdaw nest—there’s nothing better to do, at this point. I’m bored, and I’m tired, and I want my mom. And finding diamond necklaces in the nest isn’t going to help with any of that. And now the Jackdaws are coming back, and I was right—they’re huge. Blot out half the sky. We lie down beneath the straw in the nest until they go away again, and I think it’s the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened.

Or it was. But we’re not there yet.

Because they don’t actually go away. They find us, and they’re so big. So big. We’re like worms to them. And Nick attacks them with his axe before they can eat us, but it isn’t enough. There are so many of them. By the time they finally give up and go away, none of the Scarecrow’s straw is left in his body. We have to restuff him with the shiny trinkets and jewels scattered around the nest, and then he’s almost too heavy to move.

We’ve got nowhere for him to move to, anyway. The gump can’t fly anymore, and we’re a thousand feet above the ground, and on the wrong side of the Deadly Desert.

“We’ll have to use the Wishing Pills,” the Scarecrow says. And that’s a whole new argument.

“If x equals two,” the stupid Wogglebug starts.

“Your brain is pickled,” says the Scarecrow. “We’ll need to divide, obviously.”

They go on for half an hour about x’s and y’s and pluses and minuses. The Scarecrow was bad enough on his own, but now we’ve got two of these geniuses to work with. Wonderful. I have a brain too, you know. It may be just a little boy brain, but at least it’s not a bug brain, or something some fake magician cooked up in a lab for me.

The Scarecrow seemed a whole lot smarter in the stories. Maybe he’s just got the wrong kind of smarts to be a king. But the Woggle-Bug is a condescending jerk and I wish he’d never even been highly magnified. I just want to find Mombi and go home. I don’t care about this stupid war and how smart these idiots are. I just want to go home. And they are making it seriously difficult. Maybe Jack and Sawhorse and I should just take off on our own. Only we’d have to take the Gump too, wouldn’t we? And then the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Woggle-Bug would be stranded here, and I guess that would be sort of mean.

My mom is a wicked witch. Maybe I’m allowed to be mean. It’s hereditary or something.

I miss her.

“What if we started at one half?” asks the Sawhorse.

I’m so proud of my horse son.

They have me do the counting and take the pill. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted, and I start getting horrible cramps as soon as I swallow it. I feel like I’m dying. I think I’ve started crying.

“What’s wrong?” asks Nick.

“I wish I’ve never swallowed that pill!”

And just like that, all three pills are back in the box.

“It hurt,” I say.

“Impossible!” says the stupid Wogglebug. “You wished you’d never eaten it, so you haven’t, and if you haven’t eaten it, it can’t possibly have hurt you.”

I say a mean word that I overheard Mombi say once where she stubbed her toe.

“Well, I say!” starts the stupid Wogglebug.

“You can eat the next one.” 

I go over by Jack and the Sawhorse to sulk. The stupid Wogglebug takes a pill, counts to seventeen, and wishes for the Gump’s wings to be fixed.

If it was me, I would have just wished us all straight to Glinda. But he’s the smart one. Sure.

He is the one with the stomach of steel; I’ll give him that. Stupid pill didn’t hurt him at all.

We still have to spend the night in the Jackdaw nest, because it’s almost dark and we don’t want a repeat of last time. Which is why we should have wished ourselves straight to Glinda. But what do I know? I’m just a dumb little boy with a weak stomach.

We pass the time playing with the jewels and crap left behind in the Jackdaw nest—I find a really cool pocket watch, and since all the adults are stealing from the Jackdaws, I figure I can keep one thing.

It disappeared with my boy clothes. I guess you don’t get to have pocket watches when you’re—anyway. Later.

We take off right away in the morning, and get lost again almost right away. They try to wish us back in the right direction, but the Scarecrow lost the pills in the Jackdaw nest.

(He lost them in my pocket, specifically. Those are Mombi’s, and I’m saving them for a real emergency. There are two left, and I’m not letting them go to waste on a stupid bug who doesn’t even know how to wish right.)

We get to Glinda eventually, anyway. We just took the long way around.

Glinda has a girl army, too, but none of them try to stab me with knitting needles, so that’s okay. She was expecting us, because she has magic. Way stronger and cooler than even Mombi’s. And she’s so pretty. Just like in the stories.

“Jinjur has the throne now,” she says when the Scarecrow finishes telling her everything. “What right do I have to depose her?”

“Well, the Wizard left me in charge.”

“And where did the Wizard get the throne?” she asks.

I haven’t been paying a lot of attention, because I’m tired, and this is really, really cool—I’m looking at the real, live Glinda. But I know this one! There’s a ballad about it.

“He took it from Oz Pastoria, the old king.”

Glinda smiles at me, and I can feel myself blushing, bright, bright red. She’s so pretty! And strong! And cool!

“So the Wizard took the throne from Pastoria, and Jinjur took the throne from you. It seems to me the rightful ruler is still Pastoria.”

“Oh!” I say. “But he’s dead. The Wizard killed him.”

“True,” says Glinda, smiling at me again. “But did you know that he had a daughter?”

I shake my head. That’s not in any of the songs.

“Her name is Ozma. I have not been able to find her, in the past, but it seems to me that now is the ideal time for another attempt.”

We spend the night in Glinda’s palace while she tries to find the lost princess. In the morning, she tells us that shortly after coming to Oz, the Wizard paid three visits to Mombi.

I don’t even ask how she knows about that—why would Mombi see the Wizard? Why would Mombi see the Wizard and not tell me?

I guess I was probably a baby at the time, but she should have known it would be an interesting story to tell me now that I’m older.

“Mombi!” says the Scarecrow. “That’s the old woman who owns Tip!”

“We must find Mombi,” says Glinda, “and force her to tell us what became of Ozma.”

Finally. I don’t like this business about forcing, but if Glinda the Good is looking for Mombi, I should finally be able to go home. Glinda is competent, or at least the stories all say she is.

Of course, she has to get her army ready, to go up against Jinjur, so we end up staying another whole day. This is the longest—well, this was the longest I’d ever been without Mombi.

In the morning we all get in the Gump again and follow Glinda’s army. That’s good, at least. Girls can hit other girls, probably, so Glinda’s army will actually stand a chance. At the gates of the Emerald City, Glinda tells the girls with the knitting needles that they better send Mombi out or else, and I figure that will be the end of that.

But it isn’t. That’s when things get really weird. Because Mombi came out, but I could tell right away that it wasn’t really Mombi. I know my mom.

Glinda figures it out too, and breaks the spell—it’s just some girl, the same pretty girl I met the first time we came to Emerald City, enchanted to look like Mombi. Jellia, I think her name was.

I didn’t understand, then, why she didn’t come out herself. I do now. We were turning into a story, the whole stupid time, and Mombi got miscast bad.

Glinda was really mad when she turned the girl back, and I was just starting to realize that she thought Mombi was the bad guy.

No, I wanted to tell her, Jinjur’s the bad guy. Mombi’s nice. Mombi’s my mom. But how do you argue with someone like Glinda?

She went back to the gates and demanded again that they send Mombi out, and the girls invited her to come in and look. But we all went in, and looked all day, and she wasn’t there.

I was so sure Mombi was in the city. She had to be! She sent me flower girls. But maybe she knows Glinda thinks she’s the bad guy, so she’s just hiding until Glinda goes away. As soon as she gives up, Mombi will come out and take me home, and everything will be okay.

Then we all assemble in Glinda’s tent outside the city, and I see her. She’s in Nick’s button hole, disguised as a rose. She’s up to something. That’s okay. I won’t tell.

It takes until the next morning, when we’re all trying to figure out what to do next, but Glinda notices. Of course she does. I knew right away, mostly because Mombi’s mine, but Glinda is much better at magic than me. If only Nick slept, I would have taken the rose in the night and run back home to Gillikin country. But he doesn’t sleep, so I have to watch while Mombi transforms into more and more things, trying to get away from Glinda, until finally she’s caught and in her own true form again.

She takes a griffin last, and I think that one will really work—she’s flying away as the griffin, she’s almost out of sight, and then Glinda hops right onto my Sawhorse, like she has any right to at all, at takes off after her. The rest of us pile onto the Gump to see what happens, and by the time we land at the very edge of the Deadly Desert, the battle is over and she’s herself again.

Mombi. I wanted to hug her, to bury my face in her shoulder like a little boy and never come out. But everything changed that week. I was the hero, and she was the Wicked Witch, and I could tell already she was never going to be my mother again.

Maybe Glinda is supposed to be my mother now. But I don’t want her. She turned me—I just want Mombi back. I want her to drag me home by the ear and set me to chopping wood for the fire, and I want everything to be normal again.

We all went back to the city, with Mombi restrained. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her, and I didn’t understand why.

Now I do. Of course.

Glinda starts interrogating her as soon as we land, but Mombi won’t say anything, and I’m scared.

“Maybe she doesn’t know,” says Jack.

“Shut up.”

“Sorry, Father.”

That was the last time Jack ever called me father.

“If you don’t tell us,” Glinda says, “we shall have to kill you.”

Oh. Oh no. 

“Oh, you mustn’t do that!” says Nick. Thank Lurline for his heart.

“What will you do with me if I do tell?” Mombi asks.

“I shall give you a potion to forget all the magic you’ve ever known,” says Glinda.

That’s better, but not by much. I still have those two Wishing Pills, though. I can wish the magic back to her, even if it does hurt my stomach.

“Why did the Wizard come to you?” Glinda asks again. Mombi looks up, finally meets my eyes, and I can’t read her at all. It’s like she’s a stranger.

“He brought me the princess Ozma, to hide her in exchange for a few magic tricks.”

“And what did you do with the baby?”

Mombi closes her eyes and looks away from me. “I turned her into a boy.”

The others understand before I do. They all turn to look at me, and my eyes are all blurry, and there’s a roaring in my ears. The salesman—the travelling salesman was the Wizard of Oz? The Wizard of Oz killed my parents? Mombi changed me into—

“I’m not the princess! I can’t be! I’m a boy.”

“But you’re not,” says Glinda. “Not truly. We must return you to your original form.”

“I don’t want my original form! I’m a boy! You can’t change me! You can’t; I won’t let you!”

“But we must,” says Glinda, very kind, very gentle. 

I’m crying now, and Mombi still won’t look at me.

“It’s the right thing to do, Tip. Ozma.”

It takes me a few tries to get my words out again. “Mom—Mombi. You can’t take her magic. I don’t want you to—if I have to be a girl, you have to promise you won’t take her magic.” 

I’m panicking, and it’s all I can think. Protect Mombi. I have to protect Mombi, and then she’ll come back for me, and everything will be all right. But even as Glinda agrees, some of her army grabs tight onto Mombi’s arms, and I know it won’t be all right, not really, not ever again.

Glinda waves her wand.

And I’m a girl. I’m a girl. There are—my clothes are gone, and I’m wearing some flowing white dress thing. And my—other things are gone too, and it’s wrong, it has to be some horrible mistake, but here I am still and no one’s fixed it up yet and I’m empty in all the places where I’m supposed to be full, and full where I want to be empty, and it’s wrong.

Why can’t they all see it’s wrong?

Mombi breaks away from the soldiers, and I thrown myself into her arms.

“Here,” she says, shoving a pill box into my hands. “One last gift for the boy I made you. To keep your secrets safe.”

And that’s the last I’ve seen of her, probably the last I’ll ever see of her, no idea what’s going on, and I’m wearing this stupid white dress. Me. In a dress. And it’s all they’ll give me now.

I just want to be myself again.


End file.
